Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 2: The Revenge of the Ridiculous Robo-Boogers

Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 2: The Revenge of the Ridiculous Robo-Boogers is a gloriously silly comic adventure for 7 year olds, and it's the second half of a two-part story.

What happens

It's the seventh Captain Underpants book. Three giant snot monsters get blasted off into space in chapter one, and Harold reckons this will be their shortest adventure ever. (It isn't.)

This time the real trouble is Melvin Sneedly, the school's grumpy genius. He finds out the secret George and Harold have kept all along. Their headteacher, Mr Krupp, IS Captain Underpants. And Melvin wants those super powers for himself.

So he builds a time machine out of a purple portable toilet, in the school library (the one room nobody ever goes in). George and Harold get sent back to the day before yesterday. Then they go back another 65 million years and borrow a pterodactyl called Crackers.

Meanwhile those snotty robots are hitching a ride back to Earth on a space shuttle called POOPSIE. Guess what they do when they land?

Reading it alone feels like reading a comic split into chapters. There are pictures on nearly every page, huge hand-lettered sound effects (SPLAT! SPIT-TOOIE!) and lots of very short chapters. One of them is just two words long.

George and Harold's own comic sits in the middle too, wonky spelling and all. Then there's the Underpants Dance in Flip-E-Rama, where your reader flicks back and forth between two pages to make Captain Underpants wiggle. Who doesn't want to learn the most annoying dance ever?

Jokes hide everywhere. Letters go missing from the school sign. The librarian has banned nearly every book. The narrator even stops to promise it'll all make sense by chapter 17. It's the kind of book a child finishes in one go and then flicks straight back through for the pictures.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The humour is mostly bogeys, bottoms and potties, and the snot monsters come to a crunchy, dramatic end. The comic pages are spelt the way George and Harold spell, on purpose (worth a quick chat if your reader is still learning). It's American too, so expect principals and fourth graders.

If they already love a toilet joke, they'll be in heaven.

What to read next

The story picks up straight from where Part 1 stopped and ends on a proper cliffhanger. So if your reader hasn't met the Bionic Booger Boy yet, start with The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets first, then come back for the potty.